What in the Wide Wide World of Sports is A-goin’ on Here?

Every time you think that these scandals have to have run their course, something else comes up, showing us just out of control the government has gotten, and the contempt they have for our hard earned money. This is just partial list of things that have been revealed to us:

FBI/NSA PRISM Program (central servers)

IRS targeting of conservative groups

DOJ secret seizure of AP phone records

NDAA 2012

The NSA seizure of Verizon customer phone records

Fast & Furious

Benghazi

DHS ammunition/weapons purchases

DHS search and seizure of Americans with laptops/cellphones & other electronic devices as they re-enter the country

DOJ subpoena of James Rosen emails/phone records with the threat of charges of treason

Post office photographs front/back of every piece of mail it processes

Secret Service Columbian prostitute scandal

Lavish IRS parties and videos

That has to be it, right?

Nope.

It turns out now that the State Department has given lip service to “investigations”, simply halting them, and in many cases covering up wrongdoing, especially under the “watchful” eye of Hillary Clinton.

You know, the woman who wants to be President.

She’s turning out to be as big a shitbag/assclown as her husband ever was.

What exactly did the State Department cover up?

Sexual assaults by a State Department security official on people hired as embassy guards.

Hillary Clinton’s security detail hiring prostitutes while on official diplomatic trips, reminiscent of the Secret Service prostitute scandal in Columbia.

An underground drug ring operating near Baghdad.

That’s just a small taste of what the government has done.

To be fair to Senorita Shitbag, while we know that these things were occurring on her watch, we do not know if they happened with previous administrations.

“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.”

It was your job to figure out what happened, instead you ran for the exits to try to preserve your presidential hopes. We now know that any investigation that was started would end as soon as you felt everyone had forgotten about it.

I actually hadn’t intended on writing about this today.

I was going to write about the rest of the list.

People are getting more and more upset with the government. Everywhere we turn, we feel like we are being watched, and our fears are coming to light.

It isn’t that the DOJ seized records from the AP. It’s that the subpoena was secret.

It isn’t so much that the NSA has retrieved the records of millions of phone customers, which is legal by the way. It’s that it was secret.

While people’s privacy may not have actually been violated, people feel as though it were.

I’ve said before that gathering the so-called metadata about our phone calls isn’t what the big deal is. The metadata gives them a bigger picture than they claim. It not only supplies the source and destination numbers and duration of the calls, it gives the locations.

It’s the last one that really gets in my craw. The government does not need to know where I am at, whether I am making a call or not. It’s like the number of cameras that are popping up everywhere.

Posts to Facebook or some other public forum isn’t private. That’s fine.

However, when I do online banking, that’s on a secured connection, so it is private. My emails, originating from a personal account, are private. Email, though originating from a computer is, in my opinion, the same as a sealed letter.

The NSA claims that all they are doing is taking the envelope and reading the outside of it.

I think it is more like holding the envelope up to the light to see if there is anything they can see through it.

What’s even scarier, I think is the opinions of some people. A friend of mine posted on his Facebook page:

I get why people are upset about the “revelations” of government snooping phone records, google, facebook, etc. My question is, weren’t they always? I assumed that everything on the internet was being sniffed for key words and stuff since the early days. Is there something new?

He assumed the government has always done it, so it appears that, in his opinion, there is nothing to be upset about.

Someone responded

The only thing new is there are so many that think that the internet is private. They must of lost the handbook that says nothing on a public network is private.

I would agree with her, but I don’t think that connecting to the internet through an ISP like Comcast constitutes a “public” network. It does, as compared to the private networks of companies like Microsoft, but not everything on the internet is “public”. Sites that I have to sign into, like my bank, are not public. The public cannot get in and look at my account unless they somehow hack into it. The same goes for my email.

If I go to http://www.whatthehellwereyouthinking.com, that’s public, insofar as anything I post being out there for everyone to see. Anything that is on my computer is not available for public consumption, unless I set it up to be exposed to the public.

This is the line that the NSA is crossing. They have attached to the central servers of several companies, sch as Apple, Google, Youtube, and Microsoft.

They are trolling for private data.

They are claiming that this data allowed them to thwart the plans of a would be New York subway bomber.

Too bad it didn’t help them thwart the Boston Marathon bombings.

The actions of this government are a grave concern, but the attitudes of many(I know my friend is not the only one with this attitude) being “what’s the big deal? They’ve always done this” is concerning. By their way of thinking, the government can do anything and everything they want, because they are the government. There are others who are blaming Bush, who signed the Patriot Act, but they conveniently ignore that Obama greatly expanded it and has used it in ways that were never intended (most laws are like that). Bush has his own share of culpability, but he isn’t in office.

Because it may have been happening for along time, does that make it right or mean that we should just ignore it?

This goes far beyond simple snooping and spying.

Border agents have been murdered because of this administrations actions.

An ambassador, a member of his staff, and two Navy SEALs were killed because of the lack of action by this administration.

The government has suspended habeas corpus without hardly anyone noticing.

The NSA/FBI has attached itself to the servers of major technology companies to monitor internet traffic.

Both the Secret Service’s Presidential detail and the State Department have used taxpayer money to host soirees with prostitutes, while away on official business. Taxpayer money has been wasted purchasing General Motors. DHS has been snapping up ammunition like candy, prompting people to wonder who they were going to war with. Current prevailing thought is that they were trying to dry up the ammunition supply. Our taxes go to that.

DHS is illegally searching the electronics of Americans who want to re-enter the country.

All in the name of “national security”.

The IRS uses its power to influence an election.

The government has gone not just wild, but completely feral. Like a rabid dog, it must be put down.

The latest revelations show that the government cannot be trusted to investigate themselves. That’s like asking the fox to watch the hen house.

There must always be an impartial group tasked with investigating these things with no ties to the government at all. That is the only way we can get to the unbiased, unvarnished truth.

Honestly, Barack Obama may not have known about any of this, but someone in the White House had to. Someone has to be giving marching orders to someone. These agencies just won’t suddenly decide to act this way on their own.